Atari recoils as anti-piracy forces in Britain get sleazy

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Growing public backlash has led to Atari distancing itself from embattled law firm and former anti-piracy partner Davenport Lyons.

Growing public backlash has led to Atari distancing itself from embattled law firm and former anti-piracy partner Davenport Lyons.

Rarely do I get to use my position here at Geek.com to crusade against, or at least call attention to, grave social problems. Typically, my concerns here revolve around the more banal, such as whether a chunk of pixels on a disc looks good or not. This made it natural to jump on this story that shows an alarming sleaziness on the part of British law firm Davenport Lyons in its anti-piracy crusade, one that from the sounds of it would make Jack Thompson blush from a lack of decency.

Davenport Lyons has been gathering attention for some time for its questionable tactics and action upon very dubious evidence in the “anti-piracy” war, looking far more like the thief than the targets they purport to be pirates. Claims of false accusation against the law firm have been numerous, including an elderly couple charged with sharing a video game, despite the fact that they have no video games at home nor use file sharing software. According to Techdirt, they wrote Davenport three times but the charges were not dropped until the couple finally went to the press.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a pirate? The parallels of drummed up evidence here to McCarthy era railroading are there, except now the motivation is money rather than fear.

Atari, who had been closely partnered with Davenport as part of its ongoing anti-piracy campaign (energy that would be better spent improving the poor quality of their games, right now Atari games are ironically so bad that they aren’t even worth the time to pirate) but has dropped Davenport and the issue following the negative press. The only thing that will stop greedy profiteers from exploiting ever-stricter intellectual property laws in this matter is public attention, preventing interests like Davenport Lyons to railroad individuals with fabricated threats and evidence for the purposes of extorting money in a digital arena where “evidence” can be very easy to fake.